Comment by gopalv
4 days ago
> forcing function to clean up tech debt
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
I think in Steam's case it was more like a lack of competitive pressure, their publisher dashboard still packs HTML/CSS fixes for IE6/7/8 that's code they probably haven't touched in ~20 years and it's certainly not because they couldn't afford or lacked time to work on it!
Trust me, they need those. Because somewhere there are people on an old Citrix env that only contains some older browser versions
If you think Steamworks is bad, you haven't seen Microsoft Partner Center...